After our successful H1N1 swine flu check at the GIGABYTE HQ in Taipei earlier this afternoon, we were let into the building and shown the full range of upcoming GIGABYTE motherboards included in many Computex live demos.

One of the most interesting new features we saw was SATA-III or SATA 6 Gbit/s as the industry is trying to call it. This is the new standard in HDD and SSD connectivity and GIGABYTE is excited to be one of the very first motherboard manufacturers to have it on their soon-to-be-released motherboards products.

So far the GA-EP55-UD5 and GA-EP55-UD4P will include it as well as the revamped GA-EX58A-Extreme, which we will talk about more later. Possibly others will also include it, but we don't have the full details at this stage.

Regular hard disk drives struggle to even saturate SATA-II bandwidth, but current SSD drives already go very close. SATA-III or SATA 6 Gbit/s will offer maximum theoretical speeds of up to 750MB/s vs. 375MB/s of SATA-II. The chip used is from Marvell and is a SATA-II/III combo design supporting four SATA-III ports and six SATA-II ports with RAID 0 and 1 support as well as port multiplier. It is ready and working right now, although with a lack of drives, we were unable to run any tests.

While there are no SATA-III hard drives or SSDs on the market yet, there soon will be and GIGABYTE's SATA-III boards will be ready. Seagate should be the first to bring out one such drive and GIGABYTE was proud to announce it is partnering with the hard drive company for the launch.

More GIGABYTE P55 content coming up in our early Computex coverage!